Many thanks for pointing me to this. I had a brief look at the content and the comments, not yet the preceding posts and succesive posts. While I generally remain in agreement with the ALLFED teams on the neglectedness of the tail end, and how solving this also solves for other naturally occuring ASRS scenarios (albeit lower probabilities). Your argument reminds me of a perspective in animal welfare. If we improve the current condition of the billions of animal suffering, we have more of an excuse to slaughter them, in turn, empowering the meat companies, and thus it impedes our transition towards a cruelty free world.
Now I don’t think I have anything to add that was not covered by the others a year ago, but I want to take this opportunitiy to steelman your case: If the lower neglectedness and higher tractability of civil movement / policy in denuclearisation to less than 300 nuclear weapons (approximate number for not causing a nuclear winter) > higher neglectedness and lower tractability of physical intervention (resilience food and supply chain resilience plan), you might be correct!
The tractability can be assessed on the civilian organisations (in and out of EA) that have been working on this and the success rate of reduced stockpile / dollar spent
But note that at least half of the nuclear weapon deployed are in the hands of authoritarian countries [Russia: 3859, China: 410, North Korea: 30] which does not have good track record in listening to civil societies. While you could argue that Russia had drastically reduced their stockpile at the end of the cold war, many non-alligned countries [non-NATO, non Russia Bloc] have only increased their stockpile absolutely. I suspect with low confidence that reducing stockpile by a lot is tractable but complete denuclearisation, squeezeing the last 10% is an extremely hard up-hill battle if not impossible as countries continue to look up for their interests. There’s been a lot of recent talks about in hindsight Ukraine should not have given up their nuclear weapons and Russia just lifted their ban on testing them.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read & comment, Chris!
Main points
I want to take this opportunitiy to steelman your case: If the lower neglectedness and higher tractability of civil movement / policy in denuclearisation to less than 300 nuclear weapons (approximate number for not causing a nuclear winter) > higher neglectedness and lower tractability of physical intervention (resilience food and supply chain resilience plan), you might be correct!
I (honestly!) appreciate your willingness to steelman a case that (somewhat?) challenges your own views. However, I think I don’t endorse/buy the steelmanned argument as you put it here. It seems to me like the kind of simplified evaluation/description that I don’t think is very well-suited for assessing strategies to tackle societal problems. More specifically, I think the simple argument/relation you outline wrongfully ignores second- and third-order effects (incl. the adverse effects outlined in the post), which I believe are both extremely important and hard to simplify/formalize.
In a similar vein, I worry about the simplification in your comment on assessing the tractability of denuclearization efforts. I don’t think it’s appropriate to assess the impact of prior denuclearization efforts based simply on observed correlations, for two main reasons: first, there are numerous relevant factors aside from civil society’s denuclearization efforts, and the evidence we have access to has a fairly small sample size of observations that are not independent from each other, which means that identifying causal impact reliably is challenging if not impossible. Second, this is likely a “threshold phenomenon” (not sure what the official term would be), where observable cause-and-effect relations are not linear but occur in jumps; in other words, it seems likely here that civil society activism needs to build up to a certain level to result in clearly visible effects in terms of denuclearization (and the level of movement mobilisation required at any given time in history depends on a number of other circumstances, such as geopolitical and economic events). I don’t think that civil society activism for denuclearization is meaningless as long as it remains below that level, because I think it potentially has beneficial side-effects (on norms, culture, nuclear doctrine, decision-makers’ inhibitions against nuclear use, etc) and because we will never get above the threshold level if we consider efforts below the level to be pointless and not worth pursuing; but I do think that its visible effects as revealed by the evidence may well appear meaningless because of this non-linear nature of the causal relationship.
squeezeing the last 10% is an extremely hard up-hill battle if not impossible as countries continue to look up for their interests
I completely agree that denuclearization is an extremely hard up-hill battle, and I would argue that this is true even before the last 10% are reached. But I don’t think we have the evidence to say that it’s an impossible battle, and since I’m not convinced by the alternatives on offer (interventions “to the right of boom”, or simple nihilism/giving up/focusing on other things), I think it’s worthwhile—vital, actually—to keep fighting that uphill battle.
Some further side-notes
But note that at least half of the nuclear weapon deployed are in the hands of authoritarian countries [Russia: 3859, China: 410, North Korea: 30] which does not have good track record in listening to civil societies. While you could argue that Russia had drastically reduced their stockpile at the end of the cold war, many non-alligned countries [non-NATO, non Russia Bloc] have only increased their stockpile absolutely.
A short comment on the point about authoritarian states: At least for Russia and China, I think civil society/public opinion is far from unimportant (dictators tend to care about public approval at least to some extent) but agree that it’s a different situation from liberal democracies, which means that assessing the potential for denuclearization advocacy would require separate considerations for the different settings. On a different note, I think there is at least some case for claiming that changing attitudes/posture in the US has some influence on possibly shifting attitudes and debate in other nuclear-weapons states, especially when considered over a longer timeframe (just as examples: there are arguments that Putin’s current bellicosity is partially informed by continued US hostility and militarism esp. during the 2000s; and China justifies its arms build-up mainly by arguing that the huge gap between its arsenal and that of the US is unacceptable). All of this would require a much larger discussion (which would probably lead to no clear conclusion, because uncertainty is immense), so I wouldn’t be surprised nor blame you if the snippets of an argument presented above don’t change your mind on this particular point ^^
(And a side-note to the side-note: I think it’s worth pointing out that the biggest reduction in Russia’s stockpiles occurred before the end of the cold war, when the Soviet Union still seriously considered themselves a superpower)
Your argument reminds me of a perspective in animal welfare. If we improve the current condition of the billions of animal suffering, we have more of an excuse to slaughter them, in turn, empowering the meat companies, and thus it impedes our transition towards a cruelty free world.
The analogy makes sense to me, since both some of my claims and the animal advocats’ claim you mention seem to fall into the moral hazards category. Without having looked closely at the animal case, I don’t think I strongly share their concern in that case (or at least, I probably wouldn’t make the tradeoff of giving up on interventions to reduce suffering).
Again, thanks a lot for your comment and thoughts! Looking forward to hearing if you have any further thoughts on the answers given above.
Hi Sarah,
Many thanks for pointing me to this. I had a brief look at the content and the comments, not yet the preceding posts and succesive posts. While I generally remain in agreement with the ALLFED teams on the neglectedness of the tail end, and how solving this also solves for other naturally occuring ASRS scenarios (albeit lower probabilities). Your argument reminds me of a perspective in animal welfare. If we improve the current condition of the billions of animal suffering, we have more of an excuse to slaughter them, in turn, empowering the meat companies, and thus it impedes our transition towards a cruelty free world.
Now I don’t think I have anything to add that was not covered by the others a year ago, but I want to take this opportunitiy to steelman your case: If the lower neglectedness and higher tractability of civil movement / policy in denuclearisation to less than 300 nuclear weapons (approximate number for not causing a nuclear winter) > higher neglectedness and lower tractability of physical intervention (resilience food and supply chain resilience plan), you might be correct!
The tractability can be assessed on the civilian organisations (in and out of EA) that have been working on this and the success rate of reduced stockpile / dollar spent
But note that at least half of the nuclear weapon deployed are in the hands of authoritarian countries [Russia: 3859, China: 410, North Korea: 30] which does not have good track record in listening to civil societies. While you could argue that Russia had drastically reduced their stockpile at the end of the cold war, many non-alligned countries [non-NATO, non Russia Bloc] have only increased their stockpile absolutely. I suspect with low confidence that reducing stockpile by a lot is tractable but complete denuclearisation, squeezeing the last 10% is an extremely hard up-hill battle if not impossible as countries continue to look up for their interests. There’s been a lot of recent talks about in hindsight Ukraine should not have given up their nuclear weapons and Russia just lifted their ban on testing them.
Interested in your thoughts here :)
Chris
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read & comment, Chris!
Main points
I (honestly!) appreciate your willingness to steelman a case that (somewhat?) challenges your own views. However, I think I don’t endorse/buy the steelmanned argument as you put it here. It seems to me like the kind of simplified evaluation/description that I don’t think is very well-suited for assessing strategies to tackle societal problems. More specifically, I think the simple argument/relation you outline wrongfully ignores second- and third-order effects (incl. the adverse effects outlined in the post), which I believe are both extremely important and hard to simplify/formalize.
In a similar vein, I worry about the simplification in your comment on assessing the tractability of denuclearization efforts. I don’t think it’s appropriate to assess the impact of prior denuclearization efforts based simply on observed correlations, for two main reasons: first, there are numerous relevant factors aside from civil society’s denuclearization efforts, and the evidence we have access to has a fairly small sample size of observations that are not independent from each other, which means that identifying causal impact reliably is challenging if not impossible. Second, this is likely a “threshold phenomenon” (not sure what the official term would be), where observable cause-and-effect relations are not linear but occur in jumps; in other words, it seems likely here that civil society activism needs to build up to a certain level to result in clearly visible effects in terms of denuclearization (and the level of movement mobilisation required at any given time in history depends on a number of other circumstances, such as geopolitical and economic events). I don’t think that civil society activism for denuclearization is meaningless as long as it remains below that level, because I think it potentially has beneficial side-effects (on norms, culture, nuclear doctrine, decision-makers’ inhibitions against nuclear use, etc) and because we will never get above the threshold level if we consider efforts below the level to be pointless and not worth pursuing; but I do think that its visible effects as revealed by the evidence may well appear meaningless because of this non-linear nature of the causal relationship.
I completely agree that denuclearization is an extremely hard up-hill battle, and I would argue that this is true even before the last 10% are reached. But I don’t think we have the evidence to say that it’s an impossible battle, and since I’m not convinced by the alternatives on offer (interventions “to the right of boom”, or simple nihilism/giving up/focusing on other things), I think it’s worthwhile—vital, actually—to keep fighting that uphill battle.
Some further side-notes
A short comment on the point about authoritarian states: At least for Russia and China, I think civil society/public opinion is far from unimportant (dictators tend to care about public approval at least to some extent) but agree that it’s a different situation from liberal democracies, which means that assessing the potential for denuclearization advocacy would require separate considerations for the different settings. On a different note, I think there is at least some case for claiming that changing attitudes/posture in the US has some influence on possibly shifting attitudes and debate in other nuclear-weapons states, especially when considered over a longer timeframe (just as examples: there are arguments that Putin’s current bellicosity is partially informed by continued US hostility and militarism esp. during the 2000s; and China justifies its arms build-up mainly by arguing that the huge gap between its arsenal and that of the US is unacceptable). All of this would require a much larger discussion (which would probably lead to no clear conclusion, because uncertainty is immense), so I wouldn’t be surprised nor blame you if the snippets of an argument presented above don’t change your mind on this particular point ^^
(And a side-note to the side-note: I think it’s worth pointing out that the biggest reduction in Russia’s stockpiles occurred before the end of the cold war, when the Soviet Union still seriously considered themselves a superpower)
The analogy makes sense to me, since both some of my claims and the animal advocats’ claim you mention seem to fall into the moral hazards category. Without having looked closely at the animal case, I don’t think I strongly share their concern in that case (or at least, I probably wouldn’t make the tradeoff of giving up on interventions to reduce suffering).
Again, thanks a lot for your comment and thoughts! Looking forward to hearing if you have any further thoughts on the answers given above.